Age of Booty Walkthrough & Strategy Guide

Each ship has three categories of stats. Each map that you play on will start your ship with different levels in each performance category. Some maps will let two players on each team upgrade their vessels once (or a single player twice) from the start. Generally speaking though, you should expect your ship to start with almost no upgrades. To get more ship upgrades, you need to hoard the resources of wood and rum!

Speed - Ship Upgrade

Tacking on more sail allows your ship to travel faster from one end of the map to the other. If you're the player who can fully exploit the power-ups. However, more speed doesn't mean much if you are easily destroyed. However, since there's no real penalty to dying, speed means you can get a full strength pirate ship back to the front quickly should you perish.

Would you want speed as your first upgrade? That depends on the map and what you're doing. On maps with low strength towns, you can exploit this weakness and blitzkrieg the map with fast ships, take over the under defended towns and start upgrading your ships.

However, on maps with more defended towns, eschew speed for another upgrade unless you are playing large game. In such a case, grab speed if you intend to pick-up resource crates for your team and attack villages for harvesting. Harvest vessels should tack on speed since their goal is to get to the crates before the other team.

Armor - Ship Upgrade

Putting anchor chains over your wooden hulls increases the life of your ship, hence allowing you to take more damage. The other end of the specturm from speed, defence allows your ship to last a little longer against the slings, arrows, and cannons from towns and fortresses. Hence, you'll be able to survive the barrage of a town, capture it, and start healing your ship by parking next to it.

With all these stated advantages, would you want armor as the first upgrade? Possibly, irrespective of map and if you are just starting out against novice players (i.e., not the developers). Armor (at the first rank) will help you last a bit more against enemies and threats of equal or lesser attack value. However, the amount of armor you need to be a truly threatening first-rate ship of the line means you need to upgrade your armor value to the maximum. By then, the match may be over.

If you happen to be the most heavily defended ship, other players will avoid you (unless you act as a cruiser to harrass the enemy); if you are well defended, you may find yourself asking to be ganged-up on, in order for the other team to take you out. And with all the time you devoted to armoring your ship, you may not have the speed to escape.

Nevertheless, armor plays an important role in defenders. On maps with few towns, the first team who seizes a strategic town can hold it for quite some time with a heavily armored ship. "Tank" up when you are playing defensive. The maximum length of the life meter (at level 3) is precisely double of your starting (level 0) life bar.

Cannon - Ship Upgrade

Ships in the late 18th century were rebuilt with fewer number of decks in order to hold larger naval guns. Upgrading the cannon aspect of your ship means your vessel will fire not only more cannonshells, but do more damage compared with a unit with a lower attack rating. Since the principal objective of a military unit is the destruction or disruption (of action, manuever or participation in combat) of enemy units, being able to kill your enemies quickly means you effectively put them out of action --- for about five seconds.

Since enemies die and respawn so quickly, should you give a damn about increasing your attack from the start? That depends on the map. Examine the towns when you are in the lobby. If the towns on the map are heavily defended, say by one or two defence stars, you should consider increasing one of your ship's cannons to take out the town more quickly.

While having a maximum (four star) cannon rated ship is cool to look at, if the enemy can out-pace you and take more towns or gang up and exploit your lack of defences, you're dead anyway, no matter how fast you can kill people.

As you progress in long games though, you will find yourself upgrading the cannon aspect as least once, perhaps twice (or even more) in order to give your ship the ability to dispatch enemies quickly during the match. Just don't rely too heavily on the attack aspect of the ship though. It is helpful, but life or speed will help just as much, especially if you found the Bomb card.

Resources

There are permanent towns and temporary villages. There are also free resource crates that add to one of your three resources. Towns -- when captured -- generate up to two units of resources (displayed at the town). Villages give up a unit of resource once when razed.

However, there are free floating crates (lost cargo) that adds one random resource when you pick them up. These wooden resource crates are generated by the map settings, or when a player's ship sinks, a random resource (generally the last one added to the store) will be deducted from the fleet's manifest and "lost" at sea. The penalty for dying means you will constant lose resources.

Rum - Resource for Ship Upgrade

Rum is an alcoholic beverage made from a fermented mixture of sugar and water. The drink was distilled from molasses -- a by-product of the sugar cane refining process -- and sold to European naval ships in the 17th century.

Rum, as a resource in the game, allows you to upgrade one of your ship's three prime attributes: speed, armor, or attack. However, you will need at least four units of rum, in addition to another resource, to perform one ship upgrade. Hence, you will want to plan strategically what you require.

Gold - Resource for Town Upgrade

Gold, atomic number 79, was a valuable medium of exchange in the days before electronic currency and credit. If you ever wonder why gold-pressed latinum bars are still used in a universe where "money has no meaning", it's because a recognized medium of exchange is all people against a fat backdrop of a barter only system.

In the game, gold is used primarily as a resource to increase the defenses of towns. It takes four units of gold to increase a town's defence level (and hence its ability to attack and destroy enemies). Towns naturally repair themselves, so if you've got the money and the wood to spare, you can bulk up a vital town (one that generates resources you need) to insure that it is very difficult for enemies to plunder.

Wood - Resource for Ship & Town Upgrades

Underwriting all the upgrades in the game is wood, although the game (and the designers) sometimes refer to this resource as lumber. Lumber is machined or prepared wood -- wood ready for purposes of construction. The resource in Age of Booty can be either, since wood workers are quick to make wood into usable lumber in just a few days. Wood is the one resource you will probably have a great want for, since it is used both to improve towns (your bases) and your ships.

A team can stock up on rum and gold, but without wood, they cannot do anything. Conversely (and perversely) you can also stock up on wood but lack the rum and gold to suitably upgrade. Remember that it takes two units of wood for either the town or ship upgrade, in addition to the four units of rum or gold. Hence, having an ample source of resources means you should upgrade your ships and towns quickly -- ships first (since you keep those upgrades even if you die) and towns second (unless it is very vital to your map's strategy).